In fairness Asylum who makes films like Sharknado seem to have tongue most firmly in cheek and besides the films are so idiotic that their hilarious. Whereas Hollywood produces huge big budget Sci-Fi films which are as stupid as Sharknado but no where near as hilarious. I am thinking about films like Independence Day, which is scientifically at least as dumb has Sharknado but no where near as funny.

Sharknado 3 Octopation Alien cephalopods rush to finalize their billion year old plan for world domination by using the Obama weather control satellites to send, first sharks then giant hyper intelligent eight armed monstrosities via waterspouts as far inland as Minnesota where they have already mind controlled at least one liberal professor.
Hey, if six tiny helicopters can lift a three hundred foot tall robot out to fight monsters erupting from a hole in the bottom of the sea then anything is possible.

I thought the point was that they’re meant to be ridiculous? I mean, Netflix is basically ordering these b-monster movies by the dozen. We’re not going to get ‘intelligent science fiction’ on television; these movies are categorically different from that genre and for whatever reason Netflix and Hulu (or whatever it is) and the rest of these content portals are essentially funding these …films.

If you want intelligent sci-fi, for love of all that makes sense, skip “Pacific Rim.” In a long list of egregious groaners, they had Kaiju monsters with identical genotypes but wildly different phenotypes. I was trying to think if there is ANY way that could be possible, and the only thing I could come up with is a ginormous genome that included all of the DNA to make each individual monster type (or monster “kind” as our creationist friends call them–prolly) but where only the genes required to make an individual monster are expressed. But that doesn’t make any goddamn sense, either. Would it KILL screenwriters and directors to at least TRY to gin up something plausible? I was all ready to suspend disbelief to watch Godzilla versus Transformers, and then the biology was such shit I could barely pay attention.

Get yourself BBCAmerica. The recent (and ongoing) sci-fi series on BBCA Orphan Black is doing quite a “take-down” on the whole “transhumanism movement”. Probably not what you were visualizing but they paint ‘transhumanism’ as the “bad-guy”. Not a “paid shill”, but a major fan of Orphan Black. BBCA really puts Syfy to shame for “plausible” sci-fi stories. [I hate “sci-fi”; prefer “SF” as the acronym for ‘science fiction’]

Those themes have never gone away in the print market (although there are many works that blur the boundaries of cyberpunk or focus on different technologies – hence terms like “postcyberpunk”, “biopunk”, and “nanopunk”). And there is good science fiction being written in other sub-genres too.
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But, as PZ says, SyFy is far more a source of bad science fiction than of good science fiction.

Hey! That’s a Canadian series, by Space (Bell Media). It’s also filmed in Toronto. BBCA is a co-producer.

Give credit where it’s due. BBCA didn’t come up with the show, they help to produce it; it’s a Canadian venture, even the creators are Canadian.

It’s rare enough for Canada to produce such good content (other than children’s tv) disseminate outside of the country, so it stings to have BBCA credited with the show just cause they co-produce and air it.

Space and the Canadian creators are the ones putting Syfy to shame, not BBCA.

I can’t take credit, but someone had the Australian version for the sequel: Hurricangaroo.

And to gregpeterson (#18), you should do some checking up on how organisms reproduce. It isn’t such a bizarre concept. In bees, sex is (ostensibly) determined by the number of chromosomes you have as there is no sex chromosome. Unfertilized (haploid) eggs hatch into males. Fertilized (diploid) eggs hatch into females. (There is evidence that it is more complicated than that…rather there is an allele where if you have only one copy, you’re male, if you have two different copies, you’re female. Thus, since haploid individuals only have one copy, they’re necessarily male. Females generally have two different copies. There are cases under inbreeding where two identical copies are present and develop into males.)

In some reptile species, sex is determined by the temperature in which the brood is incubated.

Thus, it is not completely inconceivable that a species might have a single genome for all individuals where environmental and epigenetic factors account for variations in morphology.

So if you can suspend your disbelief that something the size of a skyscraper can wander around with impunity, ignoring physics and biochemistry, then surely you can suspend your disbelief for some genetics.

Next one will be World War Shark. A virus turns people into sharks. They suffocate, die, and become zombie sharks. Which grow machine guns for some reason. Also, one of them becomes Hitler. And then, Axe Cop arrives.

Hey! That’s a Canadian series, by Space (Bell Media). It’s also filmed in Toronto. BBCA is a co-producer.

APOLOGIES! slip of the tongue keyboard. I did NOT mean to imply BBCA was producing the series, just that BBCA is where to see it. Just carelessness, on my part, to assume my poorly phrased wording would be understood exactly as I intended. Me bad.

I agree about Continuum, excellent sci-fi SF. And even though it can be seen on SyFy, it is clearly NOT produced by SyFy.

Tsharknaumi: The Great Wipeout. When a tidal wave approaches La Jolla, everyone evacuates. Except of course the hardcore surfers who decide to hold the mother of all safaris. Unfortunately the wave turns out to be full of giant mutant sharks.

Someday I’d like to see some intelligent science fiction on the television, and you aren’t helping.

I’d kill a man, in front of his own mother, for a descent TV space opera, I haven’t seen one of those since Firefly. No, BattleLOST Galactica doesn’t count. However, that costs money and while capitalists love to make, they also like to spend as little of it as possible. X-Files-rip-offs and New-Age-Navel-Gazings are cheaper to make.

I few weeks back I finished Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon. Awesome novel, the best “noir” sci-fi I’ve experienced since Blade Runner, and plenty of the the dystopian, cyberpunk/transhumanist elements you’re looking for. I had heard that it had been optioned for the silver screen, but it appears to be in development limbo. Second book, Broken Angels was OK, but I was expecting another dectective-style story rather than a military sci-fi piece. I hope Woken Furies is better.